Free Republic

Savannakhet - Five security officers in the village of Loynam, in Nong district in the province of Savannakhet, arrested a Christian man named Sort, they tied him to a pole and then they laughed and kept asking him to give up his Christian faith. The man, who did not give in, is still in prison in Nong. As Fides learns, a year ago, Sort, 40 years old, converted to Christianity, becoming the first Christian in the district of Nong, consisting of about 20 villages. Fearing the spread of Christianity "like a virus", on May 15 the police went to Sort’s...

Introduction The story first hit in last week on the Slovakian tech site DSL.sk.  Since I am not linguistically equipped to follow the Slovakian tech scene, I didn’t hear about the story until it was brought up in English on TechCrunch.  The gist of these reports is this: DSL.sk did a test of the “ballot” screen at www.browserchoice.eu, used in Microsoft Windows 7 to prompt the user to install a browser.  It was a Microsoft concession to the EU, to provide a randomized ballot screen for users to select a browser.  However, the DSL.sk test suggested that the ordering of...

It's January, and the new clothes and toys your family got at Christmas aren't going to fit into those overstuffed closets. Time to start seriously culling. But before you make a donation to a local charity, stop and ask yourself: "Will my trash really be their treasure?" The best donations, say those in the field, make both the giver and receiver happy. But how do you know what the charity's needs and goals are? It helps to "check the local listings," since they can vary from one region to another. And it's important to understand that the charitable landscape is...